Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; these are just some of the works produced by the Brontës which have an enduring and universal appeal. The inspirational legacy of the Brontë family can be seen in a wide variety of contemporary creativity. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to see, in one place, the work of a number of emerging and established artists from the USA, Canada, Israel and the UK, all of whom cite the Brontës as a source of continuing inspiration for their own creative practice.

Friday, December 07, 2012

Jennifer Douglas

Would you care for anything?

Preview:Friday 7th November, 6pm - 8pm

Open: Saturday 8th - Sunday 9th, 11am - 3pm

Through a dialogue between an informal and chance methodology of sculptural arrangement and a purposefully codified register of materials, Jennifer Douglas explores the relationship between installation, incident and its implied significance. Her most recent body of works employ the inherent properties of materials that are combined as constituents to echo linguistic syntax creating a sculptural phraseology that conspires to an allusion of narrative structure and points reflexively to the irreconcilable dynamics between social conformity and individual ambition.

A series of works based upon the 1990 film Misery Directed by Rob Reiner and adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, utilises cut sections of found VHS tape of the aforementioned film. Thrown randomly against large sheets of black acrylic, the tape is attracted to, and held in place upon the surface of the acrylic by the static charge between the acrylic and the videotape. Playing upon the strategies of Modernism (post-Cage), Douglas refers to the reductive formalism of Minimalism, whilst also toying with clichés of Expressionist painting through both the dead black mirror-like finish of the plastic, an indolent disregard for compositional arrangement, and the emotive titling of the works: Misery.

"I am purposefully making things from mediums that tell a story or communicate, and I seek to mis-communicate this: to twist it, and disguise it. I think that often there is a sense that the works create a scene where something has happened, or is just about to... That the materials are reduced to a base-state and then re-presented is both destructive and sinister." Jennifer Douglas - 2012

A similarly dark scenario is pointed to in Still Got It (2012) with its tangled mess of household electrical cords coiled into 'hangman's' knots, that dangle sporadically flashing tungsten Light bulbs into cans of coloured paint. Powered via a sequencing component they intermittently spell out a looped excerpt of the first line from the film Misery:

_ _ _S_ _T_ _I_ _L_ _L_ _ _ _G_ _O_ _T_ _ _ _I_ _T_ _ _ _

Spread across a modest area of floor space, the vertiginous linearity of the mass of cables draws upon Douglas' interest in the inter-relating shared origins of her drawing and sculpture. The relentlessness of the Morse message and the tension between the electrical elements of the light bulb, the liquidity of the Paint, and the household ubiquity of the electrical cord evoke a tormented sense of the Unheimlich and a ciphered disclosure of the autobiographical. A territory divided and negotiated between the humdrum obligations and responsibilities of ordinary domesticity, and with the mode of 'Artist' as autonomous and authoritarian visionary.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Image: Marcus Coates Turtle Mountain 2012, High Definition Video, Produced in association with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery as part of their Intersection International Residency program. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK.

Marcus Coates' new work takes us into the separate worlds of postcolonial exploration, modernist fetishism and new age ritual. Through installation, sculpture and video Coates addresses ways of defining a perceived essence, and strategies of quantifying the unknown.

Coates' new installation All the Grey Animals, 2012 comprises of over 80 cuboid forms each representing an animal that has been defined by its greyness. From a sixteen foot newborn Grey Whale to a one inch Grey Dagger Moth this amassed grouping of animals as objects is a brutal rendering of a vast diversity. Coates presents such a pragmatic and rational representation as a crass abstraction, a generalisation that challenges the viewer to extract an essence of a being from a human-centric definition. In parallel to All the Grey Animals is the new sculpture Marcus Coates, White British, 185x49x26cm, 2012 in which Coates turns this reductivist strategy on himself, to be represented by a prosaic counterpart - a tall, thin, white box.

Turtle Mountain, 2012 was filmed near the summit of this mountain on the fringes of the Rocky Mountain range in Southern Alberta, Canada. With The Rockies in the distance and overlooking Oldman River a naked man enacts a ritual with the setting sun whilst another films him; both are played by Marcus Coates. Seemingly concerned with a 'spiritual alignment' the performer of the ritual is autocratic and impatient, fixated on the correct way to conjure this elusive experience. The clichéd procedures and terminologies of this spiritual ritual reveal a narcissistic human tendency to commodify the most basic experience.

The Trip, 2011 is a fixed camera single channel video work that was created as part of the Serpentine Gallery's project Skills Exchange: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Care. Marcus Coates worked with outpatients at St. John's Hospice, London for 2 years from 2009. Wondering what skills and reflections on the world an artist might offer to people in the final stages of their lives, Coates began his project with the question, 'What can I do for you?' Through the ensuing conversations between Coates and his collaborators at the Hospice, many proposals emerged. One of these requests, made by the late Alex H. - the name by which he asked to be referred, was realised by the artist in 2010. Coates was given precise instructions for the trip he was to undertake on Alex's behalf. He was to travel to the Amazon Rainforest and to ask the people he encountered there a set of questions. He decided not to film or photograph the experience, but rather to rely on his own memories, impressions and the stories he collected, to enrich Alex's vision of this already imagined trip. This poignant and moving dialogue between Marcus Coates and Alex H. documents their conversations both before and directly after this journey.

The Galápagos archipelago uniquely exemplifies the delicate tension between a pristine environment and human curiosity and intervention. Over 5 years, 12 artists visited these remote and beguiling islands returning home with film footage, drawings, photographs, sculptures, sounds and imaginings. The resulting exhibition offers a surprising and contemporary insight into the cultural reality, the human stories and the living laboratory of Galápagos.

The Gulbenkian Galápagos Artists Residency Programme and Galápagos exhibition were organised by the Galapagos Conservation Trust in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with additional support from the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Natural History Museum, London.

Richard Rigg: The Inhabitant of the Watchtower

Broadcast on Basic FM:
Mon 22 October at 01:08PM
Tue 23 October at 02:32PM
Wed 24 October at 06:52PM
Fri 26 October at 06:52PM
Sat 27 October at 07:22PM

www.theinhabitantofthewatchtower.info
http://www.basic.fm/?p=1616

The Inhabitant of the Watchtower is a durational project by artist Richard Rigg. A recording apparatus was installed in the barren stage of the Mojave desert in California the device employed there records, erases then plays sound. It takes a field recording, including extremely low and high frequencies; it erases those sounds within the human audible bracket, then it broadcasts that which is remaining ultrasonic sound.
This device remains in situ and will continue to broadcast an ultrasonic portrait of its environment indefinitely. A portrait void of information for a human audience but full of information out-with the physiological limits of our perception.
The audio is a field recording taken from beside the apparatus while it completes this process of recording, erasure then broadcast in the Mojave desert. It contains the ultrasonic sound broadcast by the devise, the static sound of the apparatus completing this task of sound erasure, as well as the other sounds around it, which the machine is erasing.

CIRCA Projects is a not-for-profit curatorial arts organisation. Its main goal is to present the viewer with coherently researched exhibitions that are embedded in the present. Our work is mainly based in the presentation and production of new art works and projects within lens-based and time-based practices. Hence our aim is to encourage a critical discussion around contemporary art production and we stress the importance of regularly organising artist talks, debates and lectures in order to create an access point to art and its contexts. Exhibitions, screenings, talks, publications and commissions, in both gallery and off-site contexts, are some of the means by which CIRCA Projects works with artists.
www.circaprojects.org

Join us next Tuesday for a talk by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren, and a tour of his first UK solo exhibition colour-time-structure at Workplace Gallery.

Dahlgren's materials are often banal and quotidian, objects for everyday use produced for another purpose than art; plastic clothes-hangers, yoghurt containers, dartboards, coloured pens, mirrors, silk ribbons and so forth. Far from being read as trash, Dahlgren's formal language refers back to visual experiences which are reminiscent of various artistic modes of the twentieth century such as Constructivism, Op Art, Minimal Art and Pop Art.

Steel Sculptures

Eric Bainbridge presents a series of new works made from reclaimed steel and other more incongruous materials, drawing himself closer to the modernist abstraction of the 1950s and '60s embodied by sculptors David Smith and Anthony Caro. The sculptures extend his practice of collage, combining both formal and unexpected elements and reveal the duality which has run throughout his career.

Bainbridge has always been interested in the surface of things and previous sculptural works have incorporated materials such as fake fur and wood-effect melamine. Often described as kitsch, his preferred materials are found in second hand shops, scrap metal yards and DIY stores; his sculptures reconsider the value of the readily available and cheap. He has blown objects up to outsize proportions, covered them and piled them up in a variety of balancing acts. Bainbridge incorporates multiple components and reference points, including concepts and inspiration from art history and today's cultural field.

The Street is a programme of artist projects, events and research taking place both in and beyond the Gallery. Artist Matt Stokes has made a film tracing a story set within the local Bangladeshi community.

Matt Stokes (b. 1973) immerses himself in communities to look at the culture that shapes people's lives. His projects develop into films, installations, archives and events that utilise the collective knowledge and skills within these communities.

The film Give to Me the Life I Love shows two stories mirroring each other across different moments in time. Iqbal, shown in the present day, has a curious friendship with Mohib, a teenager who works in his uncle's food emporium. Iqbal is also shown in the late 1970s, when a young person himself, caught up in an area beset by racial tensions. The story draws on accounts of the struggles faced by Bangladeshis when first arriving in the UK and the experiences of younger generations living in East London today. Stokes collaborated with scriptwriter Syed Rahman to weave these sources together into a story uncovering possible tensions between friendships and communities in the face of hostility.

Presented alongside the film is a collection of Bengali books spanning 38 years. Transforming the gallery into a library and archive these books underpin the significance of language to Bangladeshi identity.

The idea for Give to Me the Life I Love was formed when Stokes visited the 40th anniversary celebrations of Bangladesh's liberation in 2011. Over the last year he has searched archives, talked to people locally and travelled to Bangladesh, learning about language, music and activism.

Viaindustriae will present an inventory, an exhibition on a specific issue, opening 7th october 2012.

Happy Fashion is a wide research about the "high and the low" fashion in Italy in which a series of stories connected to companies and manufacturers of the region-district of Umbria describe a piece af history of italian fashion; from Lancetti to Armani, from the xenophilous Ginocchietti to the sport innovation of Ellesse brand. A cultural trip also made of minor voices tied by "poor" clothing, tailing, pret a porter. Small companies of creative people who designed sundresses and aprons, franciscan rubber-sandals and rosaries made of coloured prayer beads. A sociological research which describes a split of the "happy society" of the 60's, 70's, 80's, (an happiness interrupted by the Years of Lead), contrasting with the crisis of the present age.

The exhibition presents in the disused factory of one of this companies, the interventions of international artists who use fashion as "antisystem", metaphor of the contraddictions of society and crisis of the language.

The editorial project starts from a research/dossier about a textile's district, conceived after the finding of documents and materials located in an abandoned building of a small firm named Happy Fashion.

Begining for a wider range of inventory the editorial staff found a world of fashion designers, cloth hactivists, fashion victims, workers à façone, producers, master craftmen working in external laboratories in the umbrian countryside. Among these, we meet Felice, trustworthy knitter who works in his house for the high society of the italian fashion scene, the so-called made in Italy.

Armsden is delighted to announce 20/12 London Art Now. Showcasing twenty of the most innovative contemporary artists at work in London today, the exhibition presents 'one to watch' as selected by twenty influential and dynamic individuals in the contemporary art sector.

In the year that sees London mark The Queen's Diamond Jubilee and host the Olympic Games, 20/12 London Art Now celebrates the very best of London's emerging artistic talent. Curated by Armsden, this exhibition explores the work of these rising stars within the exceptional surrounds of National Trust property, Lodge Park. Standing apart from London's conventional gallery spaces, this unique seventeenth century grandstand in the heart of the Cotswolds offers an inspirational setting in which to look afresh at the presentation and experience of contemporary art today.

This major outdoor sculpture exhibition presents monumental sculptural works, ephemeral land art projects and delicate interventions by over twenty leading artists. Curated by David Worthington, Vice President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, Pertaining to Things Natural... takes its name from the 17th century definition of 'physic' and is a reminder of the Physic Garden's founding mission as a place for the study of useful plants, especially those used in medicines.

The exhibition takes place throughout the entire site, with works installed in greenhouses, the café, the entrance lobby and the composting area, as well as the garden itself. This is a unique opportunity to discover the response of contemporary artists to the history of the garden and to wider environmental issues.

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About Me

Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.